Wimbledon champion Andy Murray is in a jovial mood in Melbourne as he comes to
the Australian Open having escaped from the shackles of expectation

There is normally a grim-faced pragmatism about Andy Murray on the eve of a slam. He suppresses his fondness for leg-pulling and banter, and deals with questions politely but blandly rather than create any unnecessary fuss.

The past week, however, has been unusual. For once in his career, Murray has arrived at a major tournament free of the shackles of expectation.

After 16 weeks of post-op rehab on his dicky back, and just a single genuinely competitive match in that time, it would be a near-miracle if he managed to lift the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup. The pressure is off, which may help to explain his playful mood in the interview room yesterday.

Like so many conversations at Melbourne Park during the week, this one revolved around all the famous ex-players who have been recruited as coaches over the off-season. Is there a sense, Murray was asked, in which you want to impress someone like Ivan Lendl during training sessions?

“Yeah,” he replied, “that’s definitely there at the beginning of the relationship. It’s like any relationship you have. If it’s with a woman, I would try to impress my girlfriend a lot more the first few months I was with her than I do now. I guess that’s natural.

“It’s the same with Ivan. The first few months when I was working with him, you’re kind of nervous going into practice sessions and stuff. That’s a good thing. It shows that you care and want to impress him. But then over time, you get used to having him around. It’s not quite the same. But that happens in a lot of different relationships.”

What you are saying, came the reply, is that Kim Sears does not get flowers any more? Murray grinned wolfishly. “She didn’t get many flowers at the start, either. But yeah, not so much.”

Goodness knows what Sears made of being compared to Lendl, a man with alarmingly unreconstructed views regarding the role of women in the workplace. He once teased the TV commentator Annabel Croft by bringing an ironing board to the set – the point being that she was supposedly there to iron the men’s shirts.

But whatever the domestic fall-out from Murray’s disarmingly honest comments, the revealing thing was how relaxed and chatty he was, only a couple of days before he was due to begin his Australian Open campaign against Go Soeda of Japan. “I feel like now, I should be able to cope with anything – nerves or pressure – that I’ll have to deal with on the tennis court,” he said.

If man has seven ages, according to the Bard, then Murray has burned through at least four in his tennis career already.

First there was the meteor, the 19-year-old who won his first ATP title in San Jose within eight months of turning professional. Then there was the trapped bluebottle, who spent a good four years banging his head against the window built by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

That window finally opened in the summer of 2012, when Murray kicked off a 12-month sequence of glorious successes by beating Federer in the final of the Olympic singles event. These were halcyon days, even if the rankings never quite acknowledged Murray’s pre-eminence over that period.

So where are we today? Nobody quite knows. Except that, after his back surgery and a lengthy lay-off in which to enjoy the BBC documentaries and well-wishers’ cards, Murray finds himself in reboot territory.

He has already achieved self-actualisation, to use the phrase coined by psychologist Abraham Maslow. The British public have even signalled their admiration by awarding him 56 per cent of the vote for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year – the highest total recorded in any of the programme’s 60 editions. We could go so far as to read that statistic as an apology for years of carping and criticism.

The upshot is that Murray has arrived in Melbourne with nothing left to prove. At this week’s Australian Open – the same tournament where his last attempt to dethrone Novak Djokovic was sabotaged by an unruly seagull feather — he comes in less as a dark horse than a free bird.

“The back operation is the best thing that can have happened to Andy,” said Mats Wilander, the three-time Australian Open champion and Eurosport pundit.

“He wasn’t at his best in August and September last season, after he had won Wimbledon. It was a natural reaction, and who knows how long that little slump would have lasted if he had kept going? So it was a good idea to address the problem then. It gave him time to recover, and to get you guys in the media off his back.

“Andy’s a new person now. It’s up to him from here. I think the British fans will think: ‘You did it, we can’t ask any more’. So the pressure is off him to an extent. But now it’s a case of who he wants to be: one of the great players of all time, or that British guy who finally won Wimbledon.

“The territory in front of him is open for him to choose his own path. And that could be good or bad for his results, depending on how he looks at it. It is always easier to chase something than to set out with a blank slate.”

Murray himself has been keen to play down his prospects in Melbourne, which is natural enough. Where boxers are always full of taunts and braggadocio, tennis players usually prefer to go in as the underdog – a state of mind that reduces the tension in their racket arm.

But is he ready to cash in his chips? Not yet, one suspects. At 26, Murray is younger than seven members of the top 10, and just a week older than his great rival Djokovic. Only Juan Martín del Potro, who was 25 in September, would seem to have more time.

Coming in from the blindside could even work to his advantage this week, if all the attention is on Djokovic and Nadal. Yet it is more likely that the investment he made in his own body, by opting to step back from the tour for a few months, will pay off further down the line. In the meantime, he can enjoy playing with nothing to lose, for once.

And the rest of us will be hoping for a few more oddball observations.